Intel's Clear Linux Helping AMD EPYC Genoa Hit New Performance Heights

Right off the bat when measuring the WireGuard performance and overall Linux networking stack, Clear Linux was much faster than Ubuntu, even when Canonical's distribution was set to run with the performance CPU frequency scaling governor.

Meanwhile with the NWChem computational chemistry package there was a small lead for Clear Linux -- a savings of nearly one minute per run with the given simulation.

When running the demanding NAMD molecular dynamics software, Clear Linux lost to Ubuntu but presumably in this case came down to the 320 vCPU limit currently set by Clear Linux... For smaller Genoa CPUs or those not running very scalable workloads, that 320 limit won't matter.

Clear Linux on the EPYC 9654 server had some major wins over Ubuntu when it came to the Java workloads while making use of each system's packaged OpenJDK. The Clear Linux OpenJDK has been extensively tuned for performance over the years by Intel and it continues to show well for both AMD and Intel hardware.